Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke

works.”

    “You call them FBI in Lafayette?”

    “No.”

    “How come?”

    “It’s a waste of time.”

    “Sometime you gotta try, yeah.”

    “There weren’t any identifiable prints on the package except yours and mine.”

    I could see in his face that he didn’t understand.

    “There’s nothing to tell the FBI,” I said.

    “I would only create paperwork for them and irritate them. It wouldn’t accomplish anything. There’s nothing I can do.”

    “So you want get mad at me?”

    “I’m not mad at you. Listen”

    “What?”

    “I want her to stay with you tonight. I’ll pick her up in the morning and take her to school.”

    “What you gonna do, you?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “I been knowing you a long time, Dave. Don’t tell me that.”

    “I’ll tell Clarise to pack her school clothes and her pajamas and toothbrush. There’s still one boat out. Lock up as soon as it comes in.”

    “Dave-” But I was already walking up toward the house in the light, sun-spangled rain, in the purple shadows, in the breeze that smelled . of wet moss and blooming four-o’clocks.

    It was cool and still light when I stopped on the outskirts of Lafayette and called Dixie Lee at the hospital from a pay phone. I asked him where Vidrine and Mapes were staying.

    “What for?” he said.

    “It doesn’t matter what for. Where are they?”

    “It matters to me.”

    “Listen, Dixie, you brought me into this. It’s gotten real serious in the last two days. Don’t start being clever with me.”

    “All right, the Magnolia. It’s off Pinhook, down toward the river. Look, Dave, don’t mess with them. I’m about to go bond and get out of here. It’s time to ease off.”

    “You sound like you’ve found a new confidence.”

    “So I got friends. So I got alternatives. Fuck Vidrine and Mapes.”

    The sun was red and swollen on the western horizon. Far to the south I could see rain falling.

    “How far out are these guys willing to go?” I said.

    He was quiet a moment.

    “What are you talking about?” he said.

    “You heard me.”

    “Yeah, I did. They burn a girl to death and you ask me a question like that? These guys got no bottom, if that’s what you mean. They’ll go down where it’s so dark the lizards don’t have eyes.”

    I drove down Pinhook Road toward the Vermilion River and parked under a spreading oak tree by the motel, a rambling white stucco building with a blue tile roof. Rainwater dripped from the tree onto my truck cab, and the bamboo and palm trees planted along the walks bent in the wind off the river and the flagstones in the courtyard were wet and red in the sun’s last light. A white and blue neon sign in the shape of a flower glowed against the sky over the entrance of the motel, an electrical short in it buzzing as loud as the cicadas in the trees. I stared at the front of the motel a moment, clicking my keys on the steering wheel, then I opened the truck door and started inside.

    Just as I did the glass door of a motel room slid open and two men and women in bathing suits with drinks in their hands walked out on the flagstones and sat at a table by the pool. Vidrine and Mapes were both laughing at something one of the women had said. I stepped back in the shadows and watched Mapes signal a Negro waiter. A moment later the waiter brought them big silver shrimp-cocktail bowls and a platter of fried crawfish. Mapes wore sandals and a bikini swimming suit, and his body was as lean and tan as a long-distance runner’s. But Vidrine wasn’t as confident of his physique; he wore a Hawaiian shirt with his trunks, the top button undone to show his chest hair, but he kept crossing and recrossing his legs as though he could reshape the protruding contour of his stomach. The two women looked like hookers. One had a braying laugh; the other wore her hair pulled back on her head like copper wire, and she squeezed Mapes’s thigh under the table whenever she leaned forward to